In general, piping of heating/cooling facilities, used in power-generation and petrochemical plants, industrial equipment, and a variety of fabrication systems and air-conditioning systems, is provided with various sizes and materials of a heat-insulating material (hereinafter, referred to as a “pipe-shaped insulator”) to impede heat-exchange between the piping and the outside. Using such an insulator around piping can achieve a reduction in energy consumption and manufacturing costs of heating/cooling facilities.
Recently, for the purpose of reducing labor costs and improving productivity, a pipe-shaped insulator has been installed around heating/cooling piping via automated installation lines. This necessitates standardization of the pipe-shaped insulator, to allow the pipe-shaped insulator to be automatically inserted around heating/cooling piping.
In a conventional manufacturing process of the pipe-shaped insulator, short (monofilament) fiberglass is press-formed in a mold so as to form a pipe-shaped insulator. The resulting press-formed pipe-shaped insulator has an incomplete shape with a longitudinal cut in order to enable separation of the insulator from the mold. Then, the separated pipe-shaped insulator is subjected to bonding, thereby achieving a cylindrical finished product. However, this conventional manufacturing process cannot manufacture a completely cylindrical pipe-shaped insulator. In addition, with dependence on press-forming, the pipe-shaped insulator, made of bulky short fiberglass, confronts a degradation in binding force of texture and consequently, degradation in solidity, and moreover, has an extremely low density as compared to a product thickness.
Furthermore, the above-described conventional manufacturing process must prepare several sizes of molds according to diameters of desired pipe-shaped insulators, causing an excessive increase in manufacturing costs. Also, the resulting low-density pipe-shaped insulator suffers a serious degradation in heat-insulation efficiency. Even if the pipe-shaped insulator is manufactured to a predetermined standard using an appropriate mold, the pipe-shaped insulator is easily deformed due to the cut thereof and therefore, it is impossible to anticipate a standardized product and the pipe-shaped insulator complicates automation.
With relation to installation of the pipe-shaped insulator, the pipe-shaped insulator must first be positioned around a heating/cooling pipe via the cut in the insulator and thereafter, an outer surface of the pipe-shaped insulator must be subjected to taping as a finishing treatment. Therefore, the installation of the pipe-shaped insulator is troublesome and time consuming.